Persephone Responds, by Abriana Jetté

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

What does it mean to belong to the dead? What does it mean to belong to the living? What does it mean to belong to oneself?

In Persephone Responds, Abriana Jetté offers a lyric reimagining of myth and an intimate reckoning with memory, desire, grief, and the terms of return. The dead ride along in back seats, mothers grieve and rage, lovers cross rivers, and the body becomes both evidence and inheritance.

Tender and unsparing, playful and devastating, these poems ask what it costs to leave, what it means to return, and whether becoming oneself might require learning to live among the ghosts of everything we have been told to be.

Abriana Jetté is an award-winning internationally published writer whose work has been supported by the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and has appeared in Teachers & Writers Magazine, Best New Poets, PLUME, Tampa Review, Poetry New Zealand and other places. She is the Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Creative Writing Studies and a Senior Lecturer at Kean University. She lives in New Jersey with her daughter.